It’s another sunny day in London and we city folk are milling about slightly happier than we were a few months back, when it was cold and oppressive, and we were waiting for the bump at the bottom of the economic black hole we’d not long back learned about.
Yes, it’s the pre-summer spring boom. We get it in London. It’s a taster of what could be in the summer. It’s slightly above normal warmth, days of continuous sunshine, shorts weather for girls, basketball top weather for the would-be b-boys, and happy weather for those of us who get stupidly glum in the winter. Of course there’s a downside. Those of us with oppressive hay fever remember that, as my mum used to tell me, there’s nothing free in this world. Everything costs.
All that aside, I’m still working my way through Twitter. I follow people, people follow me. I get the odd message – Someone Orother is now following you on Twitter. This means that today’s round of Twitterfeed ignoring has come to a close. Someone is following me. I have a new disciple. Someone I know, someone I should know, someone I should care about, someone who feels they should care about me, is now following me on Twitter. I have a new follower. It’s quite a thing, isn’t it? You have a new follower. You have a new disciple. Someone wants to be part of your movement, hear your pronouncements, see your links, learn the gospel according to * you *. My own Matthews and Marks and Lukes and Johns.
It reminds me a little bit of a rather splendid Kids In the Hall sketch, Ted’s Church of the Very Bright Light, which is unfortunately not available online anymore. But it’s perfect.
Eventually you fear you’re going to start writing about having a cup of tea, or, going to the library to find a book about photography, or buying a gadget that’s bound to impress your disciples, so they’ll say @graeme, let’s have a feed conversation that will make sense to us, but look oh so cryptic to those who aren’t privy to the rest of either of our feeds.
Is Twitter important, then? Well, before I plod on, I’m not going to front up like some guru of the social networking space and inflate a large pair of bellows with various statistics of why it’s the most amazing thing to happen to communications since Gutenberg sorted out his printing press. For folk like me, it’s actually another source of information – albeit a really good source, really quick and snappy and immediate and actually, quite intimate. People a little bit like you stick a lot of links up, artists you like head to your town on tour, that sort of thing.
I do find the added life clutter to be a little bit … distracting, perhaps, though. Or rather, the idea that it’s one more thing I should be doing is distracting. I should be all over apps for my iPhone or I should be torrenting movies and The Wire, or I should be listening to the MGMT. Or whatever. I should let the ghost of the times inflate my puny little lungs and puff up my chest to breathe the beautiful air circulating in and out of people I should want to be more like, perhaps.
Or, be square.
So, my old point. Is Twitter important? Well, I have to admit, the more I go on, the more I realise I couldn’t give a stuff about it. I couldn’t care less about telling people my status on Twitter. I get a cheap thrill out of Facebook, mostly because there are more of my out-and-out friends and family there. And the strange waned popularity of MySpace means that it is, oddly enough, a bit more private than either.
This doesn’t mean I hate it, though. It’s actually pretty cool. But, I suppose, it’s a sense of locating yourself in relation to the constant clamour of zeitgeist that’s so difficult, that makes us so depressed and ambivalent and uneasy in our lives much of the time, especially given that there are so many real things to occupy our lives. There are our loves, and our lives, our jobs, our health: our mothers and fathers, the teeth in our jaws, our burgeoning piles and bunions, government taxes, security threats and so on. It can be quite difficult to resolve.
Damned if you’re in, but you couldn’t be out. Odd.
Paraphrasing the great Charles Mingus, the shoes of the spirit of the times is some jive-ass slippers. And so, we’ll see.